[Houshalter]

I think his point is that both risks are tiny for most people. As an "average" American, I have basically 0 fear of being murdered or being in a terrorist attack. The average commenter here is probably significantly more at risk of dying in a car accident.

One thing to note about terrorist attacks, is they follow a power law. The vast majority of terrorist attacks are complete failures that cause barely any casualties. But the most successful ones kill thousands. It's quite possible an unusually successful terrorist attack could kill tens of millions, which would vastly overwhelm homicide statistics. E.g. if a terrorist organization obtained weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately that has lowish probability, but perhaps not low enough to make the risk greater than homicide.

Say there is a 1% chance every decade of a terrorist attack that kills 15 million people, the annual expected death toll is about 15,000, which is greater than the annual homicide deaths.

[dmoy]

If some terrorist nuked NYC, there wouldn't be 15m deaths (there could be well over 1m deaths). The chance of a terrorist attack killing 15m is probably much closer to 0.000001% than it is to 1%.

The estimated immediate casualties from another nuclear state air-burst nuking every major US city simultaneously is only like 60m. A terrorist attack would be able to achieve significantly less.

I get your general point, but what I'm going for is roughly: humans are total crap at properly estimating, predicting, and gauging the risk of crazy anomalous events like that. (I think if we weren't so bad at it, less people would play the lotto for one...)